Open AI got themselves into a legal battle with Scarlett Johansson after imitating her voice for the AI-generated chatbot, Sky.
They deny the claims that they intentionally mimicked Johansson’s voice and had an actress in place early on.
Open AI’s CEO, Sam Altman, did reach out to Scarlett Johansson requesting she replaced their actress with her own voice for the character, to which Johansson declined. The voice was reported to sound just like Scarlet Johansson’s character in ‘Her’ from 2013.
SAG-AFTRA, an influential body representing television and radio artists has reported they will be removing the character of ‘Sky’ from their products in support of Scarlett Johansson.
John Berlinski, a partner at Los Angeles law firm, Bird Marella will be her counsel if she decides to carry out legal action against Open AI.
The worry for the creative industry
This is adding to the concern of many in the creative industry as they can be easily imitated and perhaps replaced in the future.
8 different newspapers have filed lawsuits against Open AI and Microsoft alleging that their AI software is undermining the newspaper industry. The newspaper include, The New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune.
The Newspapers allege that AI companies unlawfully copied millions of their articles to train Ai products which include Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.